KAN-GLNet: An enhanced PointNet++ model for canola silique segmentation and counting

Accurate analysis of plant phenotypic traits is crucial for crop breeding and precision agriculture. This study proposes a lightweight semantic segmentation model named KAN-GLNet (Kolmogorov–Arnold Network with Global–Local Feature Modulation), based on an enhanced PointNet++ architecture and integrated with an optimized Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithm, to achieve high-precision segmentation and automatic counting of canola siliques. A multi-view point cloud acquisition platform was built, and high-fidelity canola point clouds were reconstructed using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) technology. The proposed model includes three key modules: Reverse Bottleneck Kolmogorov–Arnold Network Convolution, a Global–Local Feature Modulation (GLFN) block, and a contrastive learning-based normalization module called ContraNorm. KAN-GLNet contains only 5.72M parameters and achieves 94.50% mIoU, 96.72% mAcc, and 97.77% OAcc in semantic segmentation tasks, outperforming all baseline models. In addition, the DBSCAN workflow was optimized, achieving a counting accuracy of 97.45% in the instance segmentation task. This method achieves an excellent balance between segmentation accuracy and model complexity, providing an efficient solution for high-throughput plant phenotyping. The code and dataset have been made publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KAN-GLNet-6432/.